


This Land

by BitterWheat (BannedBloodOranges)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternative Universe - Kisara Lives, Canon - Manga, F/F, F/M, If Seto Became The Shadow King, Manga Based, Manga Characterisations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:06:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22230784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BitterWheat
Summary: If she hadn't turned back.
Relationships: Kisara/Mana (Yu-Gi-Oh), Kisara/Priest Seto
Kudos: 3





	This Land

**Author's Note:**

> Repost of ancient work. Non-profit fun only.

She takes his stolen cloak and wraps it around her white head. The sun is thick and hot and blotching her sight.

She’s given up on the scraps of rock and the sunken sands that make up the pathways of trade. Once, she never followed the almost roads, as that is where the people were, who would see her and sell her. But just over the cusp of the horizon, Egypt shrivels in smoke and rugged rock. There is no-one now to find her. In this new wasteland, she is safer then she has ever been.

Shadow struggles across the blue sky. It bleeds from the Palace’s ruins, tendrils searching and scraping across the spreading borough from her cage and her King, to her fading footfalls in the sand. She can almost sense his cry, his confusion.

She has been walking for days, and it is still not far enough.

* * *

When he first came to her, she did not resist.

She had a memory of his hand on her wrist, the tuck of arms under her knees and back, curling her inward into a body long and thin like a serpent.

Later, as he spent himself inside her, she cut her nails into his back with her lips pressed into the leather of the bed and was silent.

As he took his leave, he kissed her where her hair parted over her forehead, and she did not know what he thought as he looked at her, only that the burn of his eyes lingered in the gloom.

The days were darkness, split by food and water and the occasional walk outside banked by guards who shivered as if she had a curse sewn into her flesh.

And of course, Seto, with his cold hands and lukewarm breath, and the silver of the moon she would watch through the bars, over the rock of his shoulders.

* * *

Her stomach is already beginning to bulb, to curve out to her thighs. Her bleeding has not come. She had used the wound clock in her belly to map the months spent beneath pitiless skies. Instead, she now has a different sort of timekeeping.

It is not just the shadows that pace her journey. She had sensed the girl before, but there is so few she can trust, and so she shields herself within his cloak stinking of figs and scented wax until the girl finally appears.

The magic falls from her skin like dewdrops. Her face is whittled with scars, exhaustion. She is a child, but only just, the shape of womanhood just beginning to mark her body.

"He's looking for you," She has a thin, tired voice. It rattles around the stones. "You can't let him find you."

"He told me to run." Her own voice is croaked, ill-used. Speech has never done her any good. Tears, even less so. She brushes back her hood, revealing her pale hair, her obscene belly veined with blue like the Nile's waterways. The girl widens her dark eyes. 

"He's not what he was," She replies. Her thin shoulders slump. "Nothing is what it was."

Kisara looks towards the east. Purple murk eats away at the clouds, wherein her mind's eye, a spectre of a Palace has begun to form.

In the whispering wind, there is a beckon, of promise.

She nods, slowly.

As her feet resume their sink into the sand, the intruding girl falls into step beside her.

* * *

_To reach a place where the darkness will not touch._

Mana stops every few miles to sob into her hands, mewling in her throat like a kitten.

Kisara waits, patiently, until the girl picks up her feet to finally follow.

How many weeks do they spend in silence, she does not know, only that they pause to eat and sleep, and no matter how far they roam, the horizon eats up in mauve and foul winds, but Kisara faces towards the sun and nothing else.

"Did you love him?" Mana whispers. Kisara rests her feet in the water as silver clear as her eyes. Kisara does not answer, not at first, and his discarded cloak lies over her belly. 

"Why do you ask such things?" is her final reply.

"Because you are having his child."

"He saved me, kept me. I do not understand it. I let him do as he wished. That is all."

Mana twists her ragged linen between her fingers. She suckles at her lip like a child.

"But he wants you. He told me."

Kisara stares at Mana between the frames of her hair.

"He spoke to you?"

Mana bobs her head.

"Yes. Before he..." She swallows, hugs her knees. "...he'd never talked to me before. I should have known something was wrong."

Her laugh is dry and rotten and breaks away to another onslaught of sobs, and Kisara waits until she is finished.

"But I tricked him!" Mana beams, quite mad. She reaches into the mismatch of her robes and yanks free a flash of gold; a ring of eyes and dagger points hung far too large on her body. "I took this and fled. So I could...I believed I could..."

"What do you intend to do with it?" Kisara bathes the blisters and gristle on her soles. A kick in her stomach; defiant, demanding. 

"I don't know," Mana drops it, along with her smile. "It burns me when I sleep. I hate it."

"Get rid of it."

"I can't! It belonged to my master."

_Master._

Kisara stands, stumbles. Mana takes her arm. The child kicks harder in the space between them.

"If I die," Kisara says, matter of fact. "Cut off my hair and sell it. I think it could be valuable."

* * *

They finally reach a crowd of traders, of outcasts, of slaves and their slavers strewn about by the curse on the skyline. Crowds of the mangled in tatty cloaks, but they see the item swinging from Mana's neck and flee back into their tents.

They have no tent, but Mana has coins and Kisara her strands of silver hair, so they feast and drink and Kisara waits until Mana, sated, sleeps.

Kisara passes the camp, to the brink of the rocks where she can just about spy the smoking horizon and lies down below the stars.

Opening her legs, she waits for the child, for both death and life to occur in tandem.

The pain rips her and _yes,_ she thinks. _This is his son._

But there is the shuffle of dashing feet, the call and cry of a child that isn't hers, and there are people, there is _Mana_ with mad grief on her face, and there are hands on her, cold palms and laboured, lukewarm breath as the child struggles out of her.

Kisara pierces the back of her arm with her teeth but her screams are outmatched by a yowling that shakes the valley.

The baby is puckered purple with fluid and blood. Mana's dress is slimy with it.

The cries of Seto's child reaches the sky. The shadows spill over the border and reach for their hiding place, and everything is thick with _him_.

Kisara weeps, finally, and Mana does not understand.

* * *

The child's dark hair curls across his dusky skull.

He suckles her breast as the people march on. Mana leads, her staff pointed toward the heavens.

"We will reach the Nile, eventually," She explains to Kisara, who curls her frail fingers around the tiny head. The child's eyes, cobalt, peer up into his mother's face. "There, we can track the stars to our new home."

Kisara is weak, humbled by the agonies in her body, thighs stewed with residue muck. The sun has risen and set and the child's whimpers have drowned out the pleas on the wind.

She testingly kisses the child's head and tastes only herself, sweat on the baby's silk skin. No figs, no damp, no dark.

Mana smiles.

* * *

Gold catches on the twists of Mana's ankles and the people press back to let her pass. She has grown old very quickly. Seth sits upright in her arms. With his sullen brow, he could almost be kingly.

Boats line the shores in a mighty exodus. The breeze that freshens the sea touches her cheeks, clings salt to her lashes.

Behind her, the shadow pulsates, claws at her hair and heels.

She closes her eyes and dreams of barren stone, of a dragon coiled around a figure, stood high among the ruins of a city long left behind. She catches an echo of centuries beyond her own flesh, a story tightly untold.

It comes, falters, passes, for her child cries for her, and as she opens her eyes toward Mana and the sea, she faces the sun and does not look back.


End file.
